Shipping Guide

Find out more about drop shipping, information about the Printify Shipping Calculator and, furthermore, learn how to merge Printify flat rates with weight based shipping rates. Make sure that you pay close attention to this guide to ensure the best possible shipping rates for your business.

Check out our YouTube Channel for video tutorials on shipping and other useful resources. Subscribe to keep updated!

What does “Drop Shipping” mean?

In a nutshell, Drop Shipping is a retail fulfillment method based on direct shipping from the Print Provider to the customer or retailer. Instead of retail or ecommerce shops keeping stock ready for shipping or purchase, a customer can buy products in an ecommerce shop and the order goes directly to the Print Provider, thus eliminating the need for order fulfillment, storage space and, in some cases, even production.

At Printify, we enable Print on Demand Drop Shipping for apparel, phone cases, pillows, shower curtains, mugs, posters and more through our easy-to-use app. With our Mockup Generator, publishing new goods to your ecommerce shop becomes a quick and easy process. We handle the billing, manufacturing requests and shipping so you don’t have to. So, you see, Print on Demand Drop Shipping saves you time and effort.

Printify Shipping Calculator

For a Shopify user, the Printify Shipping Calculator is the least complicated and most efficient solution for charging your customers the correct shipping rates every time. This is because you don't need to set up shipping rates manually. Most importantly, it will automatically add Printify's flat rates to your customer's shopping cart. See our video tutorials on Printify Shipping Calculator: What it does and How to Set it Up.

You can enable the Printify Shipping Calculator if you have any of these:

Advanced Shopify plan

Carrier-Calculated shipping (you need to contact Shopify's Guru to set this up)

The Printify Shipping Calculator will make your shipping experience more efficient because it will automatically add Printify's flat shipping rates during your customer's checkout. As a result, you won't need to create weight or price-based shipping tables in Shopify.

If you also plan to sell products from other vendors, simply import or create your weight/price-based shipping settings in Printify. This will allow you to display both Printify's Shipping Calculator rates and rates from other vendors.

We created this workaround because Shopify doesn't allow you to have both Carrier Calculated rates and weight/price-based rates.

Printify live rates are only available to users with the Advanced Shopify plan, Carrier Calculated Rates in their monthly plan or the Annual Shopify plan.

Here's how to set up your Printify Shipping Calculator:

1. First of all, go to Fulfillment and Shipping settings in Printify and check the box next to “enable Printify shipping calculation on Shopify checkout”.

2. Next, press the “import shipping zones from Shopify” so you can import your shipping tables from the Shopify dashboard into Printify.

This is a workaround we designed to allow you to use Printify live rates with products that are produced by other vendors. As a result, if your customer wants to purchase a product from Printify and a product from a different vendor, we will calculate the exact shipping rate from Printify together with the rate from other vendors.

3. The next step is to go to your Shopify shipping settings and delete all the zones you have as they are now available through Printify.

4. Finally, create a new zone in the Shopify shipping settings with all of the 240 countries available and add Printify in Calculated Rates.

5. And enjoy the live flat rates.Also, in case you need any help - feel free to contact us at [email protected].

Printify Flat Rates

How to merge Printify flat rates with weight-based shipping settings

If you don't use the Shopify Advanced Plan or Carrier Calculated rates, you are limited to weight-based shipping settings explained in the following.

This guide is divided into three sections based on difficulty level and will explain to you how to set up your shipping settings based on what you sell to better duplicate Printify's flat shipping rates. Take a moment to read this guide and find the best variation for your e-commerce shop.

Easy

Medium

Example #2 - two product groups X and Y with different shipping prices. A product group is a group of Printify's products which share a similar shipping price.

Difficult

Example #1 - three products with different shipping prices.

Example #2 - three product groups X, Y and Z with different shipping prices. A product group is a group of Printify's products which share a similar shipping price.

N.B. “$5.00 + $1.50” means that a product costs $5.00 to ship and an additional item (in the same product category) ordered at the same time costs an additional $1.50.

Check out our YouTube Channel for video tutorials on shipping and other useful resources. Subscribe to keep updated!

Introduction

Easy

Medium

Difficult

Introduction

First of all, figure out which products you are going to sell. To include all possible cases, we have decided to sell variations of these products:

Product

Shipping Price

1) T-shirts from ArtGun

$4.00 + $2.00

2) Phone cases from SPOKE

$2.50 + $0.90

3) Canvases (8x10) from CG Pro Prints

$8.00 + $3.00

4) Clings (18x24) from CG Pro Prints

$9.20 + $3.00

5) Posters (16x20) from CG Pro Prints

$11.00 + $3.00

6) Canvases (24x30) from CG Pro Prints

$16.70 + $9.00

In addition, we group our products into Product Groups X, Y and Z based on shipping prices. We also assign fake weights to the products in our groups so Shopify can figure out which rate to use. This table will be used in the following examples.

Example 1

For our first example, let's say you only sell phone cases - our flat shipping rate for a phone case is $2.50 + $0.90 for each additional one:

Next, in the Shopify shipping settings you set the shipping price for products weighing 0.5 lb to $2.50 (one phone case) and products weighing 1 lb to $3.40 for scenarios in which your customer buys two phone cases. This can also be done for three phone cases and more by simply adding more price ranges.

Example 2

1.

The products share a similar shipping price. Consequently, we can use averages for one item (one phone case or T-shirt) and additional items (additional phone case or t-shirt):

One item: ($2.50 + $4.00)/2 = $3.25

Additional item: ($0.90 + $2.00)/2 = $1.45

Additionally, this allows us to keep using the same weight settings that we covered in Example 1 for reasons of simplicity :

The settings are easy to set up, however it won't precisely cover our flat rates. It will earn you an additional $0.75 on phone cases, but you will lose $0.75 on T-shirts as your clients will be charged $3.25 for either phone cases or T-shirts. The same goes for additional items.

2.

You can set your shipping price higher in order to avoid losing money on t-shirts by simply raising the price to meet our T-shirt flat rates:

3.

It's possible to choose this option with products that are more expensive to ship, however, note that you will charge your clients way above the standard prices. Here's an example of when you sell phone cases and a more expensive product - poster (16x20).

In this example, when a customer buys a poster (16x20), the shipping price will be $11.00, which is accurate. However, the same price will also be charged for phone cases and this would repel your customers. A solution to this issue, besides using average pricing, is shown in Example 3.

Medium

This is where the fun begins. In these examples we will show you how to set up shipping settings for products that have considerable differences in shipping prices. This is necessary to charge your customers appropriately, so, please, spend some time to fully understand the following examples.

Example 3

First of all, you have to separate these two products so that customers are charged correctly for each different product, for example to ensure a different shipping price for a phone case and a poster (16x20) respectively. Furthermore, this can only be done by applying fake product weights as we covered in the beginning and playing around with prices and variations that any customer could purchase.

Variations - this is what your customer can put in their cart, namely, a phone case or a poster (16x20), a phone case and a poster (16x20), two posters (16x20) and so on. Consequently, you have to be prepared for any variation of products your customer might add to their cart. Moreover, variations are represented by combinations of product groups.

For the sake of simplicity, let's already put phone cases and posters (16x20) into separate product groups to make the next examples easier to understand:

Product Group X: phone cases - $2.50 + $0.90

Product Group Z: posters (16x20) - $11.00 + $3.00

The product groups are denoted by letters X and Z, which should help you to understand the following variations.

Product group weights from the table:

Product Group X: 0.5 lb

Product Group Z: 10 lb

This is what the shipping settings will look like for the product groups:

In this example, you can see all the possible variations of what your customer could put in their cart (assuming that customer only chooses up to two products).

To verify, we can compare these settings with Printify's flat rates:

X - $2.50 (one phone case)

XX - $3.40 (two phone cases - $2.50 + $0.90)

ZX - $13.50 (one phone case and one poster (16x20) - $2.50 + $11.00)

This shows that you can also charge your customers exactly what Printify charges you by simply using fake weights and playing with different variations. You can also do this with 3 items in a cart and more by simply adding more variations like this:

The more variations you add for each product group, the less chance there is that a customer will pay the shipping rate from a different product group. However, this takes more time and effort.

Example 4

This example will show you how to set shipping settings when you want to sell items from two product groups that include more than one product in them. For this, we simply group products with similar shipping prices and use their average or highest shipping price to define the shipping price of a product group. This is the same thing we did in Example 2.

When you have the averages, simply create shipping settings as in the previous example, taking into account all the product purchase variations:

Using the average method is only suggested when all or most of your customers buy an equal amount of products in one group, for example, your customers buy 20 phone cases and T-shirts per month respectively. In this example, the shipping price will even out. If you notice that your customer purchases more T-shirts than phone cases, you will want to charge more for the Product Group X.

Difficult

You already know the principles of setting up your shipping settings; hence this section is only called "Difficult" because it works with more product groups and variations. Do not worry; the underlying principles stay the same. Please bear with the guide and enjoy the satisfaction you will get from understanding the concept.

Example 5

So, let's say you want to sell three products from each price range: phone cases, canvases (8x20) and posters (16x20):

Product Group X: phone cases - $2.50 + $0.90

Product Group Y: canvases (8x10) - $8.00 + $3.00

Product Group Z: posters (16x20) - $11.00 + $3.00

Product Group X: 0.5 lb

Product Group Y: 2 lb

Product Group Z: 10 lb

We create 3 groups because we want to separate these 3 shipping prices and charge our clients appropriately.

Finally, let's use an example where your customer can put three items in their cart:

The concept stays the same as in Examples 3 and 4; hence the main takeaway from this is how to create variations for three product groups and up to three items in the cart.

Example 6

This example is exactly the same as Example 5 except we take into account multiple products in each of the Product Groups X, Y and Z. This is the same thing we did in Examples 3 and 4.